Emphasis Added: The Foreign Policy Week in Pieces (3/22)

Emphasis, as always, added.

Worst Fatwa Ever

Another clergy member offered biblical justification for the military’s death flights, according to an account by one of the pilots anguished about dumping drugged prisoners out of aircraft and into the sea.

… the deception measures that the Iraqis were discovered to be making. Both deception and denial measures. … all of the camouflage, the obstruction of UN weapons inspectors, signals deception that was clearly related to the WMD sites.

But there was a single presumption about what that meant. And at a very fundamental level deception is conducted for one of two purposes. You either hide strength, or you hide weakness. It does not seem anybody explored the idea that they were hiding the fact that they had no WMD at all. [Or wanted it known. -- RW] Of course, the target audience for that was the Iranians, and we were the unintended audience for the deception.

“Economically, culturally, and socially, London has now left Britain behind, blasting off from the rest of the nation like some vast U.F.O.,” says Neil O’Brien, director of the think tank Policy Exchange. “The politicians, civil servants, and journalists who make up Britain’s governing class run one country, but effectively live in another.” As Abrahmsohn sees it, London could “easily declare independence. A lot of these wealthy people don’t even know these outlying regions exist. They don’t care.”

In July 2010 … a study … showed a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in Fallujah since the 2004 attacks. The report also showed the sex ratio had become skewed to 86 boys born to every 100 girls, together with a spread of diseases indicative of genetic damage — similar to, but of far greater incidence than Hiroshima. … a log of cases of birth defects amounts to a rate of 14.7 per cent of all babies born in Fallujah, more than 14 times the rate in the effected [sic] areas of Japan.

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